Three Worlds - A New Fantasy Campaign

map from: Silver Compass Maps

My original plan for the major fantasy campaign for this year was going to be Blood Sword using Fantasy Age 2nd Edition, but as the campaign books have been delayed by more than a year and a half, with no clear delivery date in sight, I had to look for a filler campaign.

I looked around for a sandbox/hexcrawl campaign that would provide about 4 to 6 sessions of play, and came across Through the Valley of the Manticore from Gelatinous Cubism, which seems to fit the bill. I particularly enjoyed the geographical setting of the campaign and its "The Keep on the Borderlands" vibe. I had the idea of looking for more campaign modules that will fit with Through the Valley of the Manticore, and looked at some of the early D&D modules, but eventually decided that the two other campaigns from Gelatinous Cubism can actually be set in the same world.

The thought of linking the three campaigns together set me on the path to, over the past couple of weeks, world-building.

But before we go any further, I would just like to say that the map above is not done by me, nor is it the map which I plan to use for my game world, which has... no world map.

Other than the three regional maps from the three modules, I am not planning on actually creating a world map. I do have some idea of how many continents my world has (well, it's either three or four, I haven't quite decided) and what their geographical relationships to each other are, but as the three modules will all be set in the "New World" (the "third" continent in the narrative, known as the Third World in the setting), there is no need to detail the geography of the "Old World".

Now the... difficult part.

As the name "New World" suggests, the setting of my campaign will be an analogue of America. I am aware that in recent years D&D (and by extension all fantasy RPGs) had been accused of having "colonialist roots". I think an argument can be made for that, and that the geography of the early D&D module and its premise are based on those of America and their "frontier" mythology, but in this case I have chosen to steer into the colonialist roots of D&D on my own accord, and have the campaign explore what it is like living in a fantasy world at a time when civilisations come to a clash.

In this campaign, orcs will be the original inhabitants of the New World. They will not all be "evil" or "noble savages", and they will not be a monoculture - their many cultures will be based off Native American cultures, though I do not claim to known enough about them to be "representing" these cultures in the game. The campaign is set some 150 years after the first contact between the Old World and the New World, when the disease brought by the inhabitants of the Old World had caused the deaths of 95% of the New World and caused their advanced civilisations to collapse.

The "explorers" of the Old World: elves, dwarves, and men, now find themselves in a vast new land, sparsely populated by strange and unfamiliar peoples, largely uncultivated and littered with ruins and tombs containing grave goods made from gold and precious stones, all seemingly there for taking.

What drove our PCs to venture across the ocean to come to the New World? What do they hope to gain in their travels into the strange land, and what will they learn about the people of the land and about themselves?

Due to difficulty with scheduling, the campaign will be in the open-table, drop-in, drop-out format. As a result, I have decided to forgo the more complicated Fantasy Age 2nd Edition rules and instead return to Five Torches Deep, although I will be transplanting the rules for magic from the former to the latter.

I hope you will join us in our campaign.